WITH that expansion of the spiritual horizon, and that deepening of awe, which comes to the emerging religious consciousness of man, there comes too a realistic perception of our own true status over against the great reality of God. We perceive our littleness and immaturity; the uncertainty of our touch, the haziness and the narrow limits of our human understanding even at its best—all that is meant by ‘creatureliness’. That human understanding may indeed seem remarkable when measured by planetary and evolutionary standards. Those who only see in man a ‘greater ground-ape' have every
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right to regard him as a very successful and intelligent specimen of his class. But this intelligence soon reveals its inadequacy when we try to use it on the material proposed by our nascent transcendental sense. It fails us completely when we seek to apply it to ultimates, as those who have looked deepest into divine things have always been the first to realize. ‘The divinest and the highest of the things perceived by the eyes of the body or the mind’, says Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘are but the symbolic language of things subordinate to Him who Himself transcendeth them all.' (1) Or, as his fourteenth-century follower tersely puts it, ‘Of God Himself can no man think.’(2)
This limitation is as true to-day as it was when the antique and the mediaeval contemplatives wrote of their ascents into the ‘divine cloud’. Our brain has been developed in close association with sensory mechanisms, and sharply reminds us of the fact directly we attempt to transcend them. We cannot ‘think Absolutes’ save by image and analogy. Hence the large part played by symbol and image in all vigorous human religions; the thinness and dryness which afflicts those systems which insist on their rejection, forgetting the humbling truth that the finite mind’s apprehension of universals must ever be symbolic and oblique. We cannot, in fact, in our present status directly conceive or experience ‘pure’ spirit. The claim to do so is merely a piece of intellectual arrogance, which honest self-analysis is enough to cure. We can only experience spirit when mixed with some sense-element; and though in the highest reaches of religious experience this sense-element may become so tenuous as to be almost imperceptible, a candid examination will yet discover it. Even the Quaker’s inner light, or the
(1) De Myst. TheoL, cap. i.
(2) Cloud of Unknowing, cap. vi.
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‘divine dark’ of negative mysticism, even the contemplative’s ineffable conviction of union with God, carry with them a visual or tactile reference which involves at least a faint sensual reaction. Those have not been among the least of the saints who have recognized in the Beatific Vision itself some equivalent for the sense-conditioned experiences of men; and been humble enough to accept the supernatural with and through these its natural veils.
‘What do I love when I love Thee?’ says St. Augustine. ‘I love a certain kind of light, and voice, and fragrance, and a kind of food and embrace, when I love my God: a light, melody, fragrance, food, embrace of the inner man. Where for my soul that shines which space does not contain, that sounds which time does not sweep away, that is fragrant which the breeze does not dispel, and that tastes sweet which when fed upon is not diminished, and that clings close which no satiety disparts.’ (3)
So too his English pupil:
‘And we shall endlessly be all had in God, Him verily seeing and fully feeling, Him spiritually hearing and Him delectably smelling and sweetly swallowing.’ (4)
‘For Thou,' says Nicolas of Cusa, ‘dost abide where speech, sight, hearing, taste, touch, reason, knowledge and comprehension merge in one.’ (5)
Such sayings as these seem to point to a vast sublimation of that here-and-now conviction of reality which our senses give us upon levels accessible to all: to a possible stretching out and up of the soul, through sense, to that which is beyond sense a transfiguration in which the whole of man’s composite nature shall, in its own way, experience God. Hence these confessions of the saints should be enough to save us from that implicit vulgarity which despises the externals of religion and
(3) St. Augustine: Confessions, Bk. X, cap. 6.
(4) Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, cap. xlii.
(5) Nicolas of Cusa: The Vision of God, cap. x.
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our quasi-physical responses to grace; and tries, in the true spirit of the parvenu, to advertise its advancement by the unworthy expedient of leaving old acquaintances behind. And as a matter of fact, I think most persons who have received direct religious impressions would probably be found to agree, that those which were condensed into some symbolic form whether woven into words or pictures, or connected with dogmatic conceptions were recalled far more easily than those momentarily more impressive but elusive ‘pure experiences’ which seem entirely independent of our sensory mechanisms. These, it is true, have the ‘noetic quality’; but only those who have experienced it know how maddening the ‘noetic quality’ can be. In so far as our half-developed and limited minds can be said to ‘know’ anything of their mysterious environment, it is plain that they know the world of the senses best; and that without some sensory reference, they are incapable of conceptual thought. This at least is equally true for realists and idealists. Cut off from all sense-stimulation, conceitedly rejecting the outward as a mediation of the inward, most of us are merely left sooner or later at the mercy of the vagaries of the dream-consciousness. We cannot in this easy way divide our bodies and our souls, and renounce our racial inheritance.
It is true that for our spiritual consciousness—or at least, that which reaches the level of mystical experience—only the immediate is recognized as truly and fully real. No symbol or particular can be identified with God: and in those rare moments when intuition seems to apprehend Him, all image appears to be banished from the mind. Nevertheless God, Who is present with all things, can be and is mediated to us by means of particular things.
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Because God is Spirit, and because man is spirit and is more and more to constitute himself a personality, it does not follow that man is to effect this solely by means of spirits and personalities, divine and human. . . . But, as in all mental apprehension and conviction there is always, somewhere, the element of the stimulation of the senses, so also does the spirit awaken to its own life and powers, on occasion of contact and conflict with material things. Hence Eternal Life will (here below at least) not mean for man aloofness from matter and the bodily senses, nor even a restriction of their use to means of spiritual self-expression; but it will include also a rich and wise contact with, and an awakening by means of, matter and things. (6)
This, the truth on which sacramentalism rests, covers indeed all religious practices. It witnesses to their fruitfulness and necessity; to man’s need of a concrete world in which his instinct for the Transcendent can assert itself, and, by attaching itself to symbols, achieve expression. The ‘immediate experience’ is rare, and because of its apparent authority is much subject to illusion. Moreover it cannot be procured at will; but is, as theology says, a ‘given grace’. Without impugning its reality, we may agree that it cannot be the normal means of human intercourse with God.
In Gerhard Hauptmann’s play of Hannele a dying child in the loveless squalor of a pauper refuge is visited and consoled by angels which appear to her like the brightly coloured figures of a German Christmas card and is at last received by Christ; whose face is the kindly face of the one human being who had ever shown her some compassion and love. Yet, none the less, the poet makes us feel that Hannele’s experience mediated though it be by images and symbols at the level of her understanding and desire is in the deepest sense a true experience; and that Christ and the angels are verily with her in this quaint disguise. And theology can afford to allow this: and on the same count to throw the mantle
(6) F. von Hugel: Eternal Life, p. 389.
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of charity over many devotions repugnant to superior minds. For, according to the profound teaching of Nicolas of Cusa, within the Absolute Vision of God all limited modes of vision are subsumed; and every limited vision partakes of that Absolute by which it exists, and without which it could not be.(7)
Thus we need not be ashamed to admit, that there is necessarily something of Hannele in all our apprehensions of Reality. ‘We are bound by our situation to interpret our relations with it in human, approximate, and historical ways, if we are indeed to feed our life on That which transcends yet permeates all life.' ‘Pure thought’, ‘pure conation’, ‘pure communion’—all these abstract and largely imaginary purities must find some expression, in the end, in particulars; because it is for the apprehension of particulars that our finite minds are framed. This embodiment, it is true, will spoil their ‘pureness’; but it will give them actuality, link them with our life. Only in some such humbling limitation of the soul’s freedom, such an impingement on things, can we hope to bring Reality into concrete action. The spiritual mind, impatient of limitation, tends like a comet to rush off into space. It craves ‘the bare desert of the Godhead, where no one is at home'. But even so, we notice that it is still under earthly symbols that the most exalted of contemplatives describes the haven of his desire: and if he is not to be lost for ever in the Unconditioned, he is drawn back in the end to the small and ordered system of which, after all, he is a part.
Thus there is a sense in which the charge brought by psychology against religious persons, of constructing and externalizing their own objects of devotion, is often true and capable of defence. Examples of this abound. One
(7) The Vision of God, cap. ii.
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known to us all is the ideal figure of the Madonna; which has been and is the focus of so much intense religious feeling, yet certainly is not a realistic or historical presentation of our Lord’s Mother, the Galilean carpenter’s wife. Christian feeling has built up this figure; but this does not mean that through it no objective spiritual fact is reached. It only means that when the mind is dealing with such difficult realities, it is driven to use to the utmost its image-making power; and that the Supernatural, which is not far from any one of us, may thus become accessible alike to the most sophisticated and most childish faith.
The situation of man is this: his contact with the world is brought about by a body. He lives and develops mainly by intercourse with, and increased understanding of, that level and aspect of the universe which we call physical. He must deal with the hard and resistant stuff of things, if he is to maintain his sense of reality. This being so, how hopeless his position would be, if God, to Whom of his own strength he can never attain, did not come to him through the very things which at every turn limit and educate him! We know now that a baby brought up on ‘rational’ lines, without any expression of the mother’s love on the level of its own small sensory cravings and emotional understanding, will grow up in a dangerously self-centered loneliness; its potential responses perverted or undeveloped.(8) A lofty and hygienic parental affection is no more use to the lonely baby than the chilly respectabilities of Cosmic Emotion are to the lonely spirit of man. Both must be met on their own level, if they are to grow in a normal way and develop all their capacities. The humble condescension of Infinite Spirit to the infantile spirits of men—that movement in
(8) William Brown: Mind and Personality, p. 190.
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which Julian saw ‘all the fair working and all the sweet natural office of dearworthy Motherhood’ (9) must reach us and be recognized even on the level of sense, if it is also to be recognized and assimilated by our babyish souls.
This necessary concomitance the intimate relation in the compound human creature of all physical and mental events gives great importance to the external accompaniments of spiritual experience. For the one level reacts upon the other; the sensory stimulus sets going the emotional series, and mysteriously prepares the supersensual path. ‘Although we cannot reach God by the faculty of sense’, says St. Thomas, ‘yet through signs that can be perceived by the senses the mind is stimulated in its aim towards God.’ (10) The ritual emphasis on posture and action—the bent knee, the folded hands, the shut eyes—all this prepares and deepens paths of discharge for transcendental feeling. It sets up associations between the life of soul and body; and gets ready for that inflorescence of the life of prayer, in which the whole man working in unity becomes the tool of God. How much stimulus the symbolic experience of the transcendent offered by ceremonial religion will thus give to the soul, depends chiefly on the quality of the reference of which that soul is capable. And this quality of content and reference hinges in its turn not only on the soul’s degree of maturity, purity and insight; but also on its spiritual culture, the concepts it has received through history and tradition, and through contact with more deeply spiritual selves. We have all experienced this truth, in the variation of our own susceptibility to liturgic acts and words: and in our knowledge that these same acts and words, which
(9) Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, cap. lix.
(10) Summa Theologica, Pars. II, Q. 84, I.
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often turn a blank face to us, glow with celestial brightness for the saints.
Thus the external accompaniments of interior communion—each verbal formula, each organic movement and percept, inevitably carrying some mental and spiritual reference—cannot safely be disregarded or despised by us. In fact, cultus, exterior devotion, may rightly be considered in ‘religious regard' as an actual evoker and support of the interior state. It is not only dramatic action, ritual or liturgy which does this: all concrete embodiments of the religious idea—the lit shrine, the beloved image—may do it too. Human instinct in its vague reaching-out towards the supernatural, has always tended to make special places, traps as it were for the celestial sunshine. It has always set apart and held precious, certain suggestive objects, actions, and ideas; which carry a weight of meaning, a halo of significance stretching far beyond appearance, and are able to release from succession the mind that surrenders to their appeal. Those who too hastily and contemptuously cast away all this ‘ceremonial religion', ‘mechanical religion’, ‘emotional religion’, and so forth, risk the disconcerting discovery that the Inhabitant of the house has gone away with the last van-load of furniture, and nothing remains but a few empty tins and a sink.
It matters much that religious expression should weave together our visible and invisible life; that we should give the senses and the muscular system, something to do which has a supernatural reference. Our experience of God—varying as it must and should between soul and soul—will not be a safe experience if it rejects all physical paths; and creates a harsh opposition between the body we cannot get rid of and the spirit by which it is informed.
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For the call of the Transcendent is a call to the whole man, and not to a particular distilled essence of him; and the demand made upon him is, that he shall strive to incarnate within the time series, and in closest contact with the world of the senses, the supersensual gift of Eternal Life.
It is surely the firm determination of Christianity thus to anchor the transcendental to the natural, to remind us that Mary and Martha are sisters and ought to live under the same roof, which constitutes its solid power. Christianity brings in plain fact at each stage; insists at every turn that we are human beings conditioned by the physical world, even while rising in thought and prayer above it. The Incarnation, the Christian Community, the Sacraments, are particular historical, social and sensible witnesses to that universal Reality which lies beyond the world of sense. These hold the adventurous air-ship of human religion firmly and safely to the planet to which, after all, it belongs: while allowing it to ascend to the upper air, and vastly to enlarge the scope of its outlook and experiences. Thence it returns to find new significance and true intimations of the Supernatural in the environment of common life. Christianity in fact recognizes the humbling truth that man’s normal contact with Absolutes can and must only be through symbols: that is to say, particular images or objects of sense, which carry for the perceiving mind a supersensual reference.
But it is the peculiar mark of Christianity that its most significant symbols can and at best do retain their own full life and actuality, their factualness, without diminishment of their symbolic office. Thus the life of Jesus, in its whole drift and incidents, is none the less a real life, entirely human and historic, because it
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is the supreme mode in which divine values are conveyed to men. The symbol, completely existent as a particular within the physical world, is here charged with the values of the universal; it is fully real on both planes, and hence a bridge between ‘the unseen and the seen’. On this count the conviction of all great Christians, that the actual incidents in the life of Jesus have a meaning and value which transcend history, and were the exact and essential media for the conveyance of spiritual truth to the souls of men, is philosophically reasonable. It justifies that trend in mediaeval thought which closely associated man’s ‘salvation' with a drama worked out on physical levels by means of the brute things of the earth, and found in the historic Passion the concentrated image of a vast supernatural truth.
It is this thought of the emergence in history of that which transcends time ‘fore-ordained before the foundation of the world’, yet entering under living symbols the successive life of one small planet and ‘manifest in these last times for you’ (11) which gives the New Testament writers their characteristic note of joyous awe. And surely all but the most obtuse can still recognize a supernatural message on the cell-wall at Florence, where Fra Angelico has painted his strange vision of the various ‘instruments of the Passion’—the scourge, the mocking face, the nails, the lance, the sponge—emerging out of the Invisible to awaken the soul’s adoring grief; giving these hard material things for evermore imperial status among the means of man’s actualization of the Love of God. It is here, rather than in his flowery Paradise, that Angelico proved himself a truly Christian artist. For Christianity of all religions most steadily and sternly rebukes all our attempts to get away from the concrete
(11) I Peter i. 20.
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into a region of pious day-dream. She will not tolerate any arrogant rejection of ordinary life. She finds ineffable grace imparted through common food, a royal humility taught by a bowl of water and a towel; and at last, when the soul’s self-giving must yield to the soul’s endurance, and charity be made perfect in suffering, she links her spituial victory to the pain-inflicting power of common wood and iron.
‘Dulce lignum, dulces clavos,
Dulce pondus sustinent.’
This is the sufficient answer to those psychologists who regard religion as an escape from reality; and it finds its full expression in the Christian sacramental life, as really lived by the real saints.
Thus we see that we cannot properly separate incarnationalism from symbolism. They shade into one another. They are both exhibitions of the prime truth that human beings are not able to apprehend spirit unmingled with sense; that they need an embodiment for their absolute intuitions, and will seek and find the presence of the Infinite not only in personality but also in things. Here the history of religion, and an inspection of the constituents of our human nature, lead us to an identical conclusion namely, that it will be along sensory and sacramental channels that the supersensual tide will first flood our inland souls. For, if the fullest and most intimate disclosure of the Infinite has indeed been made to us through human personality—if in the life of Jesus of Nazareth the Godhead really accomplished its supremely characteristic self-expression in relation to man—then we cannot regard such a self-manifestation of God as a solitary occurrence. If it were so, we could not recognize its real quality. It must rather be the crowning example
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of that many graded Divine self-revelation, of which the visible world is the medium : summing up and explaining a multitude of lesser theophanies. Thus regarded, the Incarnation creates for us an absolute standard; whereby spiritual facts and values can be discerned within, yet distinct from, the world of time. It assures us of the supernatural as everywhere present with, and yet other than, the natural; insisting that ‘neither does God’s spirit live all aloof from man’s spirit, nor does man’s spirit live all aloof from man’s body, or from this physical body’s physical environment. On the contrary, throughout reality, the greater works in and with and through the lesser, affecting and transforming this lesser in various striking degrees and ways’. (12) Physical life, the world process, the whole company of Things, are therefore given a derived sanctity, as possible media of the fullest and humblest self-impartings of God.
Moreover, the same law seems to be operative within the field of secret religious experience; where pure intuition cannot long maintain itself, or even become explicit, without some resort to the machinery of sense. Hence the vision seen, the voice heard, by mystics of a certain type though in themselves capable of a wholly psychological explanation may be the media of supernatural impressions of the most genuine kind ; and those who dismiss them as merely pathological are guilty of an unscientific haste. In many of these reported experiences, we can almost recognize the desperate effort of the foreconscious mind to provide an artistic framework able to carry a whole new order of perceptions: for these perceptions can only reach consciousness by way of the self’s sensory mechanisms. Thus a significant picture surges; unforgettable words, curiously charged with meaning,
(12) F. von Hügel: Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, Series I, p. 58.
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fall sharp upon the inward ear; a new glory suddenly lights up the external world. The picture, the phrase, the illumination, are manifestly symbolic; and many of the greatest contemplatives have recognized that they are so. They may not seem to other selves adequate to their supposed content; but the choice of the experiencing soul is inevitably restricted to its own store of images, and these images carry a different quality of significance for every mind. In any event the images, however impressive, do not constitute the essence of the experience: the essence consists in the something else, the Otherness, the Absolute Present which is conveyed by means of these auditory or visual mechanisms with their human, terrestrial, and historical attachments. Certainly self-suggestion or disease may set these mechanisms going too—even the greatest saint, as theology prudently assures us, may be ‘deceived by the devil’—but then the result will not be the ‘certitude, joy and peace' of Eternal Life.
In all such types of religious experience the sensory contribution is found on investigation to be drawn from the self’s stock of memories and beliefs: though it may be so realistically presented as to produce genuine hallucination. Thus St. Teresa, though fully aware of the representational character of visions, sometimes thought it was Christ Himself who appeared physically to her: (13) whilst non-Christian mystics have received under forms agreeable to their own cultus intimations of the supersensual world. At the other extreme the sensory material may be so sublimated that it merely carries a sufficient pictorial or verbal reference to redeem the intuition from entire inefrability ; as when Angela of Foligno ‘saw God darkly’ yet ‘saw .nought that can be related of the tongue nor imagined in the heart’.(14) In other words, the vision
(13) Life cap. xxviii.
(14) Angela of Foligno: Book of Divine Consolations, p. 181.
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or audition may be ‘exterior’ or ‘intellectual’ in type. The distinction does not seem to be important. What does matter is the aura of association carried by the image or significant phrase; the extent in which it fulfils the symbolic office of releasing from succession the mind that makes use of it, and opens a window upon Eternity.
Such a dependence on the physical as a channel of transcendental experience is not of course confined to the religious field. Our apprehensions of the sublime, whether in nature or art, are always of an indirect and sacramental character. A very little reflection is enough to convince us of this. When we are awed by the intolerable majesty of the Himalaya, when we look, with a sense of strangeness, at the lonely hostile beauty of the Eismeer—only water at a low temperature after all—or taste the sense of infinity which is mediated by a strictly finite desert landscape, we are merely receiving through symbols adapted to our size, intimations of the Absolute Beauty, the concrete universal, from which all our experience proceeds. With an increase in our own stature, a change in our optic nerve, or a reduction of scale in those corrugations of the planet which now evoke the emotions of reverence and joy, these symbols would cease to convey the sublime to us. Thus for most of us a thunderstorm, that unfailing witness of the ‘numinous’ to primitive man, has ceased to carry any supernatural reference. Ants and bees, should they ever develop the human instinct for absolutes, would find in another series of symbols the intimations we discover at our own level, and in our own way, of the Supernatural indwelling and yet transcending life. For no symbol is capable in itself of giving ‘pure’ beauty or holiness; any more than the easy blankness of the quietist is capable of giving ‘pure’ contemplation.
She just cannot resist taking a swipe at one of her pet dislikes. (DCW) |
Looking at an object which is
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‘beautiful’ or ‘sacred’ for us, we are if we receive a genuine aesthetic or religious impression passing through and beyond this object, to the experience of an Absolute revealed in things.
It is true that the Beautiful, thus presented, seems to require of us an immediate veneration for its own sake. Here is the most perfect apparent fusion of sense and spirit: the Transcendental is given in the thing, and in such a manner that we cannot separate substance and accident. A Beethoven sonata, the Samothracian Nike—so too the shock of an imperial sunrise, or a suddenly discovered soldanella alone in a wilderness of icy shale directly satisfy the feeling they evoke; which the religious symbol often fails to do. But it is a peculiarity of the religious symbol that it need not be beautiful in order to be effective; a point which its critics often fail to understand. It is only required to set going the necessary trains of association which arouse absolute feeling, and this can be done without any appeal to the aesthetic faculty: for the Holy, though manifested in the Beautiful, can be found apart from it.
Thus the crude image, the simplest suggestion, may do just as well for religion as the aesthetic masterpiece: often indeed better, because it offers a freer passage, a wider range of interpretation to the many grades of soul using this great human highway towards God and this character alone qualifies objects of sense to be considered in supernatural regard. It is the failure of the symbol to perform this, its true office, which creates the recurrent demand for a rejection of ‘outward form’ in the supposed interests of pure inwardness. For there are two ways of using symbols. They may and should be gateways through which news comes to the sense-conditioned mind from the supersensual world: like the royal doors of the
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iconostasis, which open to reveal something of the mysteries within. But they may also become substitutes for reality; decorated screens set up between the soul and the Eternal, and merely offering to it a series of images or objects on which to spend surplus emotion in a pious way. Religious history wavers between these extremes. Where the exact form of the symbol becomes the subject of anxious thought, and the graded and poetic character of its message is ignored, we are entering the danger zone; and leaving the atmosphere of the New Testament, with its wide and generous attitude towards the visible, its bracing reminder that all religious externals and ordinances were ‘made for man’.
As a stimulant of the supernatural sense, the symbol which remains at the level of suggestion is often far more effective than that which attempts the impossible task of representation: for all efforts to conceive the Absolute by intellectual means, and give it adequate presentation, inevitably lead us to a diagrammatic view of Reality—the poorest and least adequate of all our categories. Mathematical symbols, without emotional reference, notoriously produce this result: whilst a few simple signs, carrying with them an aura of suitable associations—as for instance in Eucharistic worship—can at once bridge the gap between the successive and the Eternal world. Thus when the deacon on Easter Eve cries ‘Lumen Christi!’ and holds up his flower-wreathed taper in the lampless church, enough has been said and done.
The historic origin and exact theological justification of the chosen image here matter little, so long as the meaning it carries is accepted with simplicity: for symbols are parts of the great picture-language in which man once dealt with all his bewildering experience, and still deals best with the deepest and most mysterious levels
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of his life. Apprehension and sentiment alike are here given him through an object to which his perceptive powers are adjusted. Yet they are concerned with vast uncharted tracts of experience lying beyond that object; which has as its office the evocation of our interior response to what is already there. (Though the degree in which each type of soul will receive its spiritual food thus mixed with sense-elements will vary greatly, yet there must plainly be some such physical reference in every healthy spiritual life. The fact that such a life seeks in its measure to incarnate, and give physical expression to the Eternal, makes this inevitable. Reflecting on these facts, we are no longer amazed that Christian initiation is accomplished by ‘a little oil, a little water, some fragments of bread and a chalice of wine’.
‘Genuine divination, or apprehension of the transcendent through symbols’, as Otto most justly says, ‘is not concerned at all with the way in which a phenomenon be it event, person, or thing came into existence, but with what it means; that is, with its significance as a “sign” of the holy.’ (15)
Here our spiritual apprehensions seem to work upon the same lines as do our other levels of reaction to existence; where again and again, under analysis, we find a simple and significant image opening up a true experience of the unseen.
One day at the Zoo a desert antelope (probably concerned for sugar) came to the bars as I was passing and gazed into my face. And suddenly the bars, the concrete floor, and all the stable-like surroundings vanished; and I saw, through the creature so firmly fixed in those here-and-now surroundings, the wild, free and anxious life of the desert—a whole non-human world. The antelope had abruptly entered the symbolic sphere, and become
(15) R. Otto: The Idea of the Holy, p. 149.
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capable of mediating universals. Thus to see through and beyond Things, and by their help to enter a world which transcends those particular things, is one of the queer prerogatives of man. A whole world and level of being was gathered up and made accessible to me in that tawny agile body, those soft and eager nostrils, those keen yet melancholy eyes. Yet so little does the authentic origin of the symbol matter that my antelope, as a matter of fact, was born in the Zoo.
II
IF by means of the symbol, and the symbolic and aesthetic use of objects, man has a certain access to the supernatural, a limited contact with the Unlimited One; in those half-physical religious deeds which we call sacraments, a further stage in his spiritual education seems to be reached. Something is here done by and to him, by means of natural objects used in supernatural regard. A gift is made to him in ways that are specially appropriate to his situation; placed as he is upon the frontiers of the natural and spiritual worlds. For if the symbol is an evoking sign, a condensed, sensible presentation of Something Other; the sacrament is an efficacious sign, whereby this Something Other is truly given. It is a genuine embodiment of the Eternal, a communication of the supernatural with and through natural accidents. Panem de caelo praestitistl eis: omne delectamentum in se habentem. (16) Thus the symbol, the thing, through which men reached out to and apprehended the Infinite, now becomes the path by which the ever-present Infinite itself, with its own fresh dower of life and grace, comes into the little lives of rnen. As in great
(16) Breviarium Romanian: In Festo Corporis Christi.
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poetry linked words are suffused with an unearthly glow and splendour, and carry a heightened significance far beyond their literal meaning: so in the sacraments, things and deeds which emerge from the common stock of human experience are suffused with a supernatural splendour and become for the soul genuine 'vehicles of grace’. Perhaps those who have most fully realized the latent power of conveying the supra-sensible which is possessed by certain sounds and certain things, and is evoked by their artistic use, will come nearest to understanding what the sacramental use of objects is, and tries to do yet how truly ‘given’, how completely independent of the little earthly sacramentalist or artist, is the beauty and otherness thus conveyed.
The Christian theist does or should reserve the term ‘sacramental’ for this real self-giving of Spirit along the channels of sense; and symbol for that object or image which evokes in us an intuition of the Transcendent, or creates for religious emotion a suitable path of discharge.
Note: In the above sentence, the original text has the word "deserve", not "reserve". As such it appears to make no sense, and I have accordingly substituted the word "reserve" which does make considerably more sense in the context. (DCW)
PS Note below that another of her bete noirs is shafted in passing. Even paganism admits of an integrity denied to pantheism.
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We ought therefore to resist the diffuse application of ‘sacrament’ to any and every natural act and thing which seems to carry a religious reference. Much of the vague modern talk of ‘wayside sacraments’ is only pantheism in a surplice and stole, and blurs the distinction between the vehicle and the gift. The genuine sacrament, whether Christian or pagan, is a condensed and dynamic exhibition and communication of the Transcendent, by means of certain deliberately chosen physical acts and things, wherein the stuff of our sensory experience becomes the stuff of our spiritual experience too. Hence while it uses symbols, it is far more than a symbol; since here the supernatural is not merely suggested but actually conveyed.
Symbols, then, suggest and represent; but sacraments
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work. They always have a dramatic and dynamic quality. They are special deeds, in which the action proceeds at two levels. Something genuinely done within the natural sphere by and to the body a real washing, eating, touching or anointing involves something genuinely done within the supernatural sphere by and to the soul. Thus we have in sacraments ‘a clear manifestation of the principle which informs the whole universe, the utilization of lower grades of being for the purpose of the higher, even the highest’. (17) They give man a sensible experience of supra-sensible realities; and by means of successive and particular acts convey the unchanging Universal. For this reason, they would appear to be of all religious deeds those most perfectly adapted to our two-fold human status. The true sacramentalist humbly accepts our bodily limitations. Yet, by and through these very limitations and under the bewildering conditions which they impose, he does discover most vividly at work, the ceaseless and generous divine action ; quickening, feeding, supernaturalizing the small emergent soul which is so intimately linked with this its bodily home.
‘A thick black veil,’ says Newman in a beautiful and celebrated passage, ‘is spread between this world and the next. We, mortal men, range up and down it, to and fro, and see nothing. In the gospel this veil is not removed; it remains, but every now and then marvellous disclosures are made to us of what is behind it
At times we seem to catch a glimpse of a Form which we shall hereafter see face to face. We approach, and in spite of the darkness, our hands, or our head, or our brow, or our lips become, as it were, sensible to the contact of something more than earthly. We know not where we are, but we have been bathing in water and a voice tells that it is blood. Or we have a mark signed upon our foreheads and it spake of Calvary. Or we recollect a hand laid upon our heads, and surely it had the print of nails in it, and resembled His who with a touch gave sight to the blind and raised the dead. Or we have been eating and drinking; and it was not a dream surely that One
(17) W. Temple: Christus Veritas, p. 240.
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fed us from His wounded side, and renewed our nature by the heavenly meat He gave.’ (18)
Here, in special explication of the sacraments of Catholicism, a theologian who is also a poet describes as only a poet can hope to do the soul’s veritable contact with the Supernatural through veils and by symbolic deeds. Is it wonderful that so delicate and mysterious an apprehension, wavering between the utterly intangible gift and the evidently inadequate sign, should be exposed to easy misunderstandings and little able to bear the cold glare of laboratory lights? Certainly it is in this sphere of religion that the difficult tension between the temporal and the eternal, the visible and the invisible, becomes most acute; especially on the one hand for those concrete and logical minds which are compelled to rationalize every experience, on the other for those ‘mystical' souls in whom the spiritual consciousness is awake. Yet being what we are, it seems that only a religious practice into which the sacramental element enters deeply can fully protect the first type from the cramping and sterilizing effects of a merely intellectual religion, or support the second type in those recurrent periods of dereliction when the inner light seems to vanish; assuring them of a supernatural contact wholly independent of our fluctuating moods. And only this humble and willing reception of the Holy by ways and means fitted to our common condition, can save either class from an isolation from their fellows which might easily become arrogant. Only this, by its full and willing utilization of our here-and-now physical status, the interdependence of soul and body, can sufficiently accentuate the creaturely quality of man.
When we look at the whole history of redemptive religion, its gradual discovery of those profound wants
(18) Parochial Sermons, vol. v, I.
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which Christian supernaturalism meets, we see how homely and yet how transcendental is the ministry of its sacraments. For man, wherever awakened to ultimates, ever finds in himself two great needs, which cannot be satisfied from within; the need of purification, the need of support. He requires at the very least an initial cleansing, to mark his transference from an earthly to a heavenly citizenship; from the self-regarding and instinct-ridden life of the human animal to the free, God-regarding life of the human spirit. He needs too a constant feeding, if he is to maintain this his new status, and the germ of supernatural life within him is to expand. His emerging spirit must be accompanied step by step by the ceaseless support and self-giving of the Eternal, its healing, restoring, energizing power, if it is to grow up to its full stature. Thus signs of the hidden Other, even appointed trysting-places, are not enough for him. He needs to be assured of the utter and childlike dependence of his tiny spirit on God’s Being—of the fact that its very life hangs upon an actual infusion of the life of the Other—of all that religion means by ‘grace’. This infusion, this gift—if it is to meet the conditions of our common nature—cannot be brought home to him by way of some ‘pure’ but elusive experience; only apprehensible in certain states of soul, or by certain ‘spiritual’ types of men. It must come by the pathways of sense, through that physical order to which every soul is attuned. By ordinary water, as well as by Spirit; by ordinary bread and wine, as well as by the supra-sensible Food.
The sacraments are a perpetual witness that man thus needs something done to him, here and now. They declare that an access of Supernature is needed, which he cannot get alone: and that this access of Supernature will reach him most easily along natural paths. Their
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whole emphasis is on this givenness; They remind us that our innate thirst for the Infinite is not the governing fact of our religious life, and cannot be satisfied by any effort we are able to make. That Infinite must come to us before we can go to it; and it is within the sensory and historical frame of human experience that such supernatural gifts are best and most surely received by our successive and sense-conditioned souls. Thus the sacramental principle continues to press upon us that profound truth which the Incarnation so vividly exhibits: that the whole of man’s spiritual history, both corporate and solitary, involves and entirely rests in the free self-giving of God—is conditioned from first to last by the action of His all-penetrating, prevenient and eternal love. ‘He it is that desireth in thee and He it is that is desired. He is all, and He doth all, if thou might but see Him.’ (19) Through the Christian sacraments that self-giving, of which the Incarnation is the supreme example, finds another and a continuous expression: sense here becoming the vehicle through which the very Spirit of Life enters into the little lives of men.
This profound truth, that the Universal is best given to men through the hallowing of particular natural acts and objects, and not by a precarious abstraction from the conditions of normal existence, already seems dimly apprehended in the Pagan sacraments of purification, feeding, and communion. It is fully explicated in the Christian scheme; where the only personal petitions of the Lord’s Prayer for food, forgiveness, deliverance from evil receive their answer in the sacraments of the Church. Jesus Himself by His baptism accepted a sacramental dispensation: and if the brilliant suggestion of Dr. Schweitzer be adopted, and the stories of the feed-
(19) Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, Bk. II, cap. 24.
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ing of the Four and the Five Thousand relate to a Eucharistic meal which ministered to the citizens of the Kingdom the bread of Eternal Life, His whole method is then seen to be charged with sacramentalism.(20) That this should be so is consistent with all that we know of a revelation made to men in life rather than in statement, and by One whose loving vision embraced and held together the perfection of the divine generosity and the smallest homely details of human life: a revelation which dealt little in doctrine, and much in significant deed.
For sacraments as such tell us little or nothing; and modern religious talk about the ‘teaching’ of the sacraments surely blurs their real character. They do something. They communicate ‘otherness’, the supernatural, in the way in which the ordinary man can best receive it: that is, through things—concrete natural things lifted up by man’s hands, not by man’s imagination, to meet the ceaseless self-giving of God. What is given is ‘grace’, the energy of God Himself; a genuine participation in Eternal Life, not information about it. Moreover, here the sense of history, of the Eternal present within succession, enters profoundly into the religious experience of man.| By this humble resort in traditional bodily acts to the very source of Holiness, he does indeed, as a Kempis says, ‘put his mouth to the hole of the heavenly pipe of the fountain’; (21) and from within the time-stream, and under accidents which reflect the moulding influence of history, tastes of that which transcends history. The last Christian neophyte meets the first disciples at the same purifying font under symbolic veils; receives, through the hand of the accredited agent of the Supernatural Society laid upon his head, his share in the same quickening and indwelling Spirit; is fed at the altar with
(20) Cf. A. Schweitzer: The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, cap. vii,
(21) De Imitatione Christi, Bk. IV, cap. 4.
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the mysterious and unchanging food which has nourished the souls of the saints.
The richness of meaning, the extended aura of significance, which has been acquired by sacramental practice in its long progress through history, now makes it possible for us to gather up and express by this method, at once so ‘material’ and so ‘mystical’, an ever more profound communion of the soul—more, of the whole man—with the substance of Eternal Life.
In the above sentence I believe the word "and" in the phrase "and ever more profound communion" should be "an" if the sentence is to make sense. I have accordingly corrected the text. (DCW) |
Man’s supernatural growth is therefore never to be assessed by the extent in which he can dispense with such ‘outward means’; but rather by the use that he is able to make of them. As his capacity for God expands, his sense of mystery grows more delicate and deeper, so does he learn more and more to find ‘the soul’s life, a hunger and a satisfaction of that hunger, through the taste of feeling rather than through the sight of reason; God giving Himself through such apparently slight vehicles, in such short moments, and under such bewilderingly humble veils; and our poor a priori notions and a posteriori analysis, thus proved inadequate to the living soul and the living God.’ (22)
Thus sacramental religion does open a door, through which the Infinite comes with its gifts right down into the common life of our half-animal race; and we, again, can go out towards it, so far as our love, purity and courage permit us for this path between the soul and God is utterly misconceived by us, if we allow ourselves to think of it as a one-way street. So apparently hedged in by our most humiliating and least spiritual limitations, so full of distressing reminiscences of a racial past that we should like to ignore, it does give in human ways,
(22) F. von Hügel: The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. I, p. 241.
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and under human conditions, a veritable access to Ultimates.
Especially in the Eucharist, the aura of associations seems to spread to the very fringes of the created world; to include the most secret and close of all personal relationships, and plunge into those mysterious deeps of personality where the creature in its poverty and weakness feeds on a generous and abiding life. For here a frame is made within which each man, at whatever stage of growth he may be, has access to the incarnate, and thus to the transcendent, Reality. In the language of theology, he can here accomplish ‘in union with Christ’ the surrender of his self-hood to God. Since Christ’s Incarnation stands for the Christian as the most perfect self-expression of Reality in terms of space and time, complete continuity is here established between the fullness of the supernatural generosity and the heart-breaking wonder of human sacrificial love; between every level of creation visible and invisible—the vine and wheat, the sunny terrace and ploughland the ‘star-dust and the planet’, the Angels, Archangels and all the Company of Heaven—and the first holy feeding in the Upper Room. More, continuity between this historic yet eternal act and every little Christian altar, every adoring act of spritual communion with the Ever-loving, accomplished within the hearts of the saints. Whilst the holy Presence is not limited by its sacramental expression, that sacramental expression is a sign which can convey to men along the channels by which they receive news from their physical environment, the assurance that this Presence is there. It is the taper in the window which tells us that the Master of the house is at home.
These various metaphors may seem upon the surface
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inconsistent. They must be understood as complementary descriptions of a single yet infinitely rich experience; in which gift and Giver are somehow recognized as one, and man’s deepest and most diverse needs are met in a way that he can understand. He is both fed and companioned; finds something at once sensible and suprasensible, historical and unchanging; recognizes and receives the Eternal and Universal by way of personality mediated through things. Yielding up his own small life in free oblation, he receives in so far as he can bear it, the actual life of the Other; and is woven into the mystical body which incarnates the Infinite upon earth. We sacrifice both richness and aliveness if we try to reduce all this to system and logical plan.
Sacramental communion thus seems able to meet under sensory and historical symbols the finite spirit’s deepest need. It is, as Ruysbroeck has it, a Way, which ‘manifests but cannot comprehend the Wayless’. (23) It communicates an already achieved, an Absolute Perfection, which that finite spirit craves but can never of itself attain. And this it does in a manner at once so profound and so simple that it can satisfy the mighty soul of Aquinas and yet meet on its own level the vague emergent cravings of primitive man. As irradiated food-stuffs conserve and convey the actual values, the life-enhancing power of the sunlight; so these visible gifts, consecrated, irradiated by the invisible glory, truly convey the supernatural and life-giving
‘Cibavit eos ex adipe frumenti: et de petra melle saturavit eos’ (24)
Here the Fully Real with its over-plus of mystery
(23) The Book of the Twelve Béguines, cap. v.
(24) Missale Romanum: In Festo Corporis Christi.
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and fascination enters humbly and completely into the tentative and many-levelled experience of the partly real. The condensed, quasi-physical act and experience open up paths along which the soul can enter into a spiritual and perpetual act and experience. The Presence specially perceived in connection with simple visible accidents, at a special point of penetration of spirit into thing, is discovered as a perpetually self-giving Food. ‘Sense quenches soul’ and passes through the natural dispensation created by God to a certain metaphysical tasting of God in Himself. Hence the awe and delight, the shamed penitence and loving wonder, which sweep the soul of the little creature thus met as it were on its own ground.
Therefore,’ says Angela of Foligno, ‘whoever meaneth to come unto this most holy Sacrament must consider to whom he cometh, how he cometh, and for what reason. For he cometh unto a certain Good Thing, which is itself all good; yet it is Itself the only good, without which there can be none other. This Good Thing sufficeth and filleth everything, satisfying all the saints and holy spirits, all those who are justified by grace, and all the souls and bodies of the blessed who reign in everlasting glory. . . . O Good Supreme, unconsidered, unknown, unloved, but found by those who with their whole hearts entirely do desire Thee!’ (25)
Moreover, if thus by things of sense we lay hold of and receive the Supernal; so too from this contact with the Supernal we come back to an entirely new and reverent apprehension of things. We learn to recognize the intimations of sense as themselves genuine if incomplete revelations of Reality: signs shown to our conditioned minds out of the infinite richness and mystery of that physical universe, of which we are ourselves a tiny part and wherein is our bodily home. Thus each smallest thing in our limited yet thickly peopled world of things becomes to us of unbounded interest and worth,
(26) Angela of Foligno: Book of Divine Consolations, p. 135.
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and carries an eternal reference. Each single soft note falling on the ear, each delicate gradation of light received by the eye, is recognized and evaluated as a point of insertion through which man receives a message from the mysterious universe, which sometimes in its solemn wholeness he can dimly apprehend. What wonder then if this message is sometimes charged with a significance exceeding that of the apparent world; if the blackbird’s song conveys melodies that lie beyond music, and the unfolding beech-leaves are fringed with celestial light?
Yet the acknowledgement of symbols and sacraments as true bridges to Reality, specially calculated to meet and satisfy the needs of the whole man, weaving together his double nature and double capacities—this must never mean for us the equation of sacraments and grace, a binding down of the soul to this one means of access to the Transcendent. Still less must it mean any arbitrary limitation of the Transcendent to this one method of self-giving to the human soul. The very gospel which shows to us Christ as the Bread of Life, gives us that same Reality under other compensating images as well. Here we need specially that humble suppleness, that delicate yet widely inclusive discrimination on which the balance, health and beauty of the spiritual life so greatly depend. We have to avoid the rough and ready solution; the crude antithesis between inward and outward, the poisonous ‘either ... or’ of controversy, the doctrinaire notions of those who are certain that the same diet must be given to every child. It is only as seen within the richly various, many-graded, and intensely living world of spirit, as penetrated through and through by its generous life and bringing that life to us along quasi-sensual paths never as a device that works with mechanical certainty, and still less as a ritual substitute for the freely willed and
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ardently pursued communion of prayer that sacraments must be regarded by us.
As the growing child requires for its development food, warmth, shelter, loving intercourse, discipline, exercise and teaching, all ministering in proper measure to the expansion of its compound nature; so too the growing soul. The child, along these various channels, receives all that it needs for a full sharing of the life of the race. The conditions which govern and limit human existence, the gifts of history and tradition, the moulding influence of the corporate life these reach and penetrate it gently and gradually along mental, physical and social routes. The harmonious growth of the child’s nature depends, not on an intensive concentration on one side of existence and the rejection of the rest; but on the careful balance observed between them. It grows best by sharing the mixed experiences of its fellows ; and making at least some intellectual and physical, some social and personal response to the external world. Indeed, the parallel between natural and supernatural growth goes further; for all these aspects of education point beyond themselves, and fail in their office if regarded as ends. Athletics or scholarship, hygiene or parental devotion—all these can thwart the making of personality if allowed to become excessive and usurp the central place. The real fulfilment of each child’s capacity, the creation of a man or woman adequate to life, transcends all means, however sacred. It may sometimes call for the sacrifice of this or that element; always for a careful adjustment of them to individual needs.
All this is surely applicable as much to the supernatural as to the natural life of man. This too is many-stranded, fed and supported by many means of grace. We starve and arrest a growing spirit—we turn a possible saint into
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a probable prig if we attempt to narrow the channels along which it shall receive the gifts of the Infinite. It too wants food, air, exercise, teaching and family affection, a social embodiment of its religious impulses, an access to Spirit through things; and also giving life, depth and meaning to these its external actions it needs the unwatched and solitary meditation in which it draws near in love to the transcendent Other, receives the intangible gifts, and learns the unspoken lessons, of the spiritual life.
The best, most balanced and life-giving experience of the Supernatural possible to us is therefore more likely to be compound and inclusive than abstract and exclusive in type. It will be most easily and naturally obtained from within a supporting religious tradition; and will have intellectual, practical, historical, sacramental and mystical elements. It will reflect upon spiritual levels something of the contrast, tension, joy, fellowship and loneliness of our bodily life on earth; and will thus satisfy, and include in the work of transfiguration, every element of the richly various nature of man. But the proportion in which these elements will appear in the experience of each soul, the supernatural reference which they carry for it, will differ enormously; and we must expect and desire that this should be. The symbol or sacrament, the psalm or the lesson, which for one is charged with an almost unbearable wonder, may turn a stony face to the excellent Christian in the next pew. That loving, silent, and image-less recollection in which the natural mystic breathes the bracing air of the Eternal, will give to his unwary imitators nothing more spiritual than the drowsy blankness which results from deliberate repression of discursive thinking; a practice condemned by all true contemplatives as ‘nought else
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but an idleness . . . wholly contrary to the supernatural rest which is possessed in God’.(27)
Thus an adequate religious system must help and allow us to find Reality both incarnate and unincarnate; in nature and in supernature too. It must leave room for the full exercise of brave and faithful thought, for the mysterious apprehensions that come by the touch and taste of consecrated things, and for the soul’s loving selfmergence in that unconditioned stillness which lies both within and beyond all thoughts and things.
(27) Ruysbroeck: The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage, Bk. II, cap. 66.
